How to use mindfulness and focus to have your best year ever
In 2004, I attended an amazing three-day leadership Summit in Anaheim California. It was organised by the late great Jim ‘how to have your best year ever’ Rohn with a host of other speakers including Brian Tracy, Denis Waitley and Charlie ‘Tremendous’ Jones!
It was one of the best organised events I’ve ever attended. I bought a gold ticket and was given an allocated seats three rows from the front.
As I walked into this massive room with about 2000 people in attendance, there was a loud rock music playing and lights flashing with cameras flying all over the place recording every moment. To say the atmosphere was electric was an understatement. It was like an earthquake of energy.
I was pleased to have an allocated seat because I hate that scrum you get when the doors open. People charging up the aisles to reserve a good seat. This was civilised and organised.
During the intervals you didn’t have to queue up through one door to get out. All the side doors were opened and right opposite where the line of tables with a drink station of water and free coffee. There are no long queues and waiting 20 minutes to get a coffee.
I sat down on my seat and said hello to the people either side of me, one of whom was a friendly young guy called Jeff Roberti.
I got chatting to him and asked him what he did. He said he was a network marketing.
Immediately I thought, okay, struggling multilevel marketing who has invested a fortune in stock pod up in his garage and he’s not making any money. My assumption could not be further from the truth.
Turns out Jeff had gone from being a waiter in Florida to joining a vitamin company and building a massive worldwide team. At the time I met him, he had just passed the “$50 million in commissions”. I later had a chance to meet Jim Rohn who knew Jeff very well and confirmed his $50 million success story. I contacted Jeff 10 years later and he was pushing $100 million and still with the same company.
Later that day, one of the speakers gave us an exercise. He asked us to turn to the person next to us and exchange our number one best tip for success.
I turned to Jeff and he started with his tip.
He became very serious and looked me in the eye and said:
“Charles, if you want be successful you have to focus on one thing at a time and keep doing that thing to the best of your ability until you succeed”
He added that when he was a waiter, he was the best waiter in the restaurant and when he joined the vitamin network marketing company, he gave it everything he had with all of his focus and attention.
Then he said okay now it’s your turn.
How the hell can I follow that? What am I going to say to him? He is my tip to make another $50 million! I can’t even remember what I said but I mumbled some rubbish and he thanked me.
What am I saying here? Am I telling you to join a network marketing company, no! You have to find whatever is right for you, but whatever it is, you must focus with all your attention and energy on that.
Nowadays, we are bombarded by millions of messages and advertisements on social media, email and television all seeking our attention.
People find it so hard to focus and concentrate that they can barely finish a book.
It’s so easy to hop from one thing to another chasing that shiny penny like a lost butterfly.
I’ve just completed a mindfulness course and part of being mindful is developing the ability to focus. Focusing on your breathing for instance.
Most people find it difficult to focus on one thing at a time. Their minds drift from subject to subject like a butterfly. Mindfulness teaches you to keep coming back to your breathing. Just focus on your breath.
In your business and career this can often lead to a lack of success.
The ability to focus is crucial to success in any endeavour.
I once heard a talk by Brian Tracy who said that he was always amazed that the dumbest kid in the class often turned out to be the most successful. He joked at how it is always so annoying to find that somebody dumber than you, is richer than you.
What Brian was really talking about was that they are the people that just focus on one thing rather than multi-tasking on dozens of things.
My mother told me a story about when she was growing up in Ireland in the 1940s. There was one boy in class who are so dumb that he tried to push a donkey with two baskets on its back through an narrow gate. Everybody could see that there was no way the donkey could get through with two baskets either side of his back. At this boy did was to keep pushing it.
A few years later houses in rural areas were being wired for electricity. This same “dumb” boy watched how they did the job and somehow picked up on it.
He then went on to wire every house in the area making a substantial amount of money and building a new business. That’s all he focused on wiring houses.
Of course, being branded as dumb just because you are not academic is entirely wrong and discriminatory. Just because somebody is not academic it does not mean that they are not intelligent or ignorant. After all, not everybody is interested in the classics, literature and poetry – the sort of knowledge that Napoleon Hill described as the kind of “general” or non-specialised knowledge is not needed to make a fortune.
We now though that IQ, largely measured by solving problems, is not the only measure of intelligence.
Footballers are often mocked because they appear to be stupid and inarticulate and uneducated. This is a snobbish middle-class view of intelligence.
Wayne Rooney was ridiculed for being stupid in the media. Yet he had an amazing ability on the field to analyse complex positions and situations of play. He could judge the accuracy of the shots or pass with uncanny ability. He could also time a header or an overhead kick of a ball flying through the air at 50 mph and score a goal. Just because he lacked academic ability, because he spent his youth focusing solely on developing his skills as a footballer, does not mean that he is dumb.
If you want to have your best year ever, use mindfulness and focus to concentrate on the really important things that matter to you and your family most. Don’t waste your time on distractions or get hung up because you can’t answer the questions on Who Wants to be a Millionaire!
Set your goals and targets and keep focusing on them. And when you mind wanders, keep “coming back to the breath”.
I wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous new year!
More articles and money news available at Money Tips Podcast - www.moneytipsdaily.com
By Charles Kelly, Wealth Mentor, Property Investor, Author of Yes, Money Can Buy You Happiness and creator of Money Tips Podcast.
There are more examples and practical steps to getting rich and being happy in my book, Yes, money can buy happiness, I cover the 3 R’s of Money Management, the Money B.E.L.I.E.F System and much more. Check it out on Amazon http://bit.ly/2MoneyBook.
If you’d like further information on wealth mentoring and coaching, how to survive the crisis and even quit the rat race, email me at Charles@CharlesKelly.net or send me a message through Facebook or my Money Tips Daily community. See more articles at www.moneytipsdaily.com
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